Interview: Nathan Nugent on Cutting those Beautiful Performances in "Room"
Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 12:15PM 
Nathan Nugent won an Irish Film & Television Academy statue for his first collaboration with Lenny Abrahamson. "Room" is their third film together.Editing is often referred to as "cutting," arguably a holdover word from the days where film edictors actually had to slice frames apart and then tape them back together. But cutting, figuratively, remains one their undeniable jobs, pruning away at hours and hour of footage for a given movie. It's a puzzle and a discovery as they work at assembling a single identity for a movie that has so many different identities in its unfinished form. Though the days of film editors hunched over their moviolas is over, the job's creative challenge is the same when hunched over the computer.
Moviegoers are probably quickest to note film editing in the action genre, where the speed of cutting tends to make the "invisible art" ever so slightly more visible. But it's a complicated art regardless of genre to create cohesive and rhythmic visual and narrative and performative throughlines with a series of spliced together images and multiple takes.
So we were excited to sit down with rising film editor Nathan Nugent, who has been making a name for himself in films that you might safely call 'actor's pictures.' Room is Nugent's third consecutive film with Lenny Abrahamson who he met through a film producer with whom Abrahamson went to college. As with the birth of many classic collaborations in any industry it was a matter of networking, opportunity and good timing. Or as Nathan humorously puts it.
"He had said to Lenny, 'Oh, you know, you should try Nathan. And I was available and very cheap.'"
What Richard Did (2012), Frank (2014), and Room (2015) followed in close succession.
NATHANIEL: You've been working with Lenny Abrahamson a lot but you didn't start out in dramas. You started in documentaries.
NATHAN NUGENT: My wish in film school was always to work in drama. But looking back, I’m glad of that -- that I took that documentary route -- because it certainly had an effect on how I see footage.
NATHANIEL: In what sense?
Nugent's answer and more on Room's beautiful acting after the jump...
